It's funny the way things go; how much we change – or don't – as we get older. My 14-year-old self had a curious relationship with the collected Bachman Books. Didn't like Rage, because I hated the protagonist; loved The Long Walk, because I could see myself there, marching with them, because it spoke to me; hated Roadwork, because oh my God it was so boring; was disappointed (!) that The Running Man wasn't more like the Arnie-driven movie (but that's a story for another day).

Rereading The Long Walk and Rage left me feeling the same as I did back in the day; revisiting them was, for better or worse, like being eased into a memory: the stories and characters came back to me as I read, alongside the same emotional responses. Roadwork, however, provoked an entirely different reaction. What I once found boring – as in, bottom of the King pile, nearly – now makes me feel terribly sad, more than a little angry (with it, not at it), and really quite impressed.

Roadwork begins with Barton George Dawes buying guns. We know this, and we know that he's a bit unhinged – he has an internal duologue going on throughout the book, between characters called George and Fred – and that he doesn't much like the plans for a freeway extension that are about to be actioned. The new road will go right through his house and his workplace both, and he's the man who has to sort out the relocation. One more thing we know, pretty much from the beginning: he has no intention of performing said relocations. Dawes is a broken man, a tired and angry man, who hides everything from those around him. There's something simmering; and we all know that simmering emotions eventually boil over.

We see Dawes' life, then, as small as it is: his wife, Mary, and their otherwise all-too-empty house; his job running an industrial laundry; his terrifyingly empty relationships with others. He's not a man to envy. Rather, there's a quietness to him that's unsettling – apart from inside his head, where George and Fred go at it great guns, which is even worse. They talk of terrible things sometimes, and you know that they will be his downfall. The reveals over the course of the narrative – that Barton and Mary had a son, Charlie, who died of an inoperable brain tumour; that Fred was Charlie's middle name, and that this was a game he had with his dad, using their middle names as terms of endearment; that everything Barton refuses to do to make his life easier is because he is so entrenched in the memories of his son and their past together – all provoke empathy (how could they not).

But still, Barton George Dawes is disintegrating. It's there on every page. He's unhinged, and he's in a very bad place. By the close of the novel his wife has left him, he's done deals with the mob, and he's blown up construction machinery with home-made Molotov cocktails. He finishes in a stand-off with the police and the media both, steadfast in his refusal to give up his house, his life, his memories. It's touching. He's hollow, and desperately wishes that he weren't. At the end, the conversation in his head is between George and (now) "Freddy", his son begging his father to not kill any of the policemen, trying to make him stay a good man; Barton projecting, trying to save himself.

As with the other early Bachman books, there's no supernatural menace, no ghosts or possessions. Instead there is something more tangible, yet no less horrifying: cancer. King watched his mother die from it only a year or so before he wrote Roadwork, and his personal pain is there on every page: in the loss of Fred, the way that Barton can't forget him, can't move on past the pain of seeing him suffer before being stripped away. In the first collected editions of the books, King wrote an introduction in which he said that Roadwork was written when he was "grieving and shaken by the apparent senselessness of it". He says the book is the worst of the Bachmans, simply because it's "trying to find some answers to the conundrum of human pain". To my mind, that doesn't make it a bad book; that makes it a book that strives for something other than scares. It's trying to fathom exactly what a person goes through; how low they can go when faced with direct loss, and how painful that loss (and its repercussions) can be.

Over time, though, something shifted: in a later edition of the Bachman Books, King wrote a new introduction. In it he says that Roadwork is "(his) favourite of the early Bachman books". I don't know what changed his mind, but perhaps it was the peace afforded by time; of being able to stand back and see what he (or, rather, Richard Bachman) had done. In the novel, that's the problem: Barton can't. He's always there, with the house and the laundry and his wife, everything reminding him of the way that things were. I'm pleased that King is at peace with Roadwork, because it sits comfortably alongside some of his best non-genre novels: a story about a real person who has been ruined by the true horrors of real life.

Connections

Weirdly, for a Bachman book, there's a connection to King's oeuvre in the narrative itself: the laundry that Barton runs, The Blue Ribbon Laundry, shares a name with the one that Carrie's mother works in. Also, it's the novel where The Mangler comes to life (from the story of the same name, published in Night Shift). They're not the same laundry (one would assume), but they all share one thing, aside from the name: bad stuff happens to those who associate with them.

Next time

A small town is terrorised by a big old crazy dog that the residents can't get rid of, just as the author is terrorised by his own unshakeable demons. It's Cujo.